This book should be the most heroic work on the shelves of any historical
library. Its subject is a gentlemen’s dining club, which for most of the
18th century, a sort of Rotary in periwigs, met in a small Scottish town.
>From here its fame spread, so its members included peers of the realm, the
odd bishop (though on his elevation he requested that his name be struck
from the records), even a king of England, and there were chapters in
Edinburgh and, amazingly, in Russia. It is just that until now professional
historians have never dared write about the Beggar’s Benison of Anstruther
on the Firth of Forth.

This is because they thought it a hoax, which, when you think about it, is a
fairly large hurdle to overcome. David Stevenson, alas, did not have this
excuse. An emeritus professor of history at St Andrew’s, he knew it was all
true, for in his place of work were the regalia of their ritual, in a locked
cupboard where a stunned university had put them after they were presented
by a local solicitor. They had been initially offered to the National Museum
by the widow of the last owner on the grounds that they were part of the
heritage of Scotland, at which point the curator fainted.

For the Beggar’s Benison were not quite like Rotary. They met to celebrate
three activities, each of which Professor Stevenson attempts to put in some
kind of historical perspective. He knew exactly where he was with the first,
with treasonable politics, one of the club’s officers having been hanged
after turning out for the Bonnie Prince, and with the second, large-scale
smuggling (Anstruther seems to have been awash with brandy). But it was the
third that brought out the mettle of the man.

The regalia of the Beggar’s Benison in St Andrews include a pewter plate
with carvings, very detailed carvings, known as the Test Platter, a horn
like a hunting horn, which was blown when the ‘testing’ took place, and a
snuff-box containing the pubic hair of one of George IV’s mistresses,
presented by the king. These played a part in the ritual surrounding the
club’s main preoccupation, which was masturbation in public.

Now these were men who were mostly middle-aged and pillars of their
community, none of them homosexual. No orgies were involved, though they got
local girls to pose naked as an aide-memoire, some of whom found it hard to
keep a straight face, for the club’s minutes record many rows between them
and the celebrants. When the latter were not about their ritual they
listened to such lectures as one given on St Andrew’s Day 1733, on
menstruation in skate. All this, according to their records, in a ruined
castle, with the winds howling in from the Forth. But why?

Professor Stevenson’s attempts to answer something which should just have
brought the priest and the doctor running over the fields (though the priest
and the doctor were probably already upstanding members) make his book a
comic classic. This is because he also tries to put all this into a
historical perspective. To him the men who made up the Beggar’s Benison
were, quite simply, agin everything. They were agin the Hanoverian
government, agin the Customs and Excise (though many were customs officers),
and they were agin the current thinking on sex. In the 1730s there had been
a great health scare about the effects of masturbation, so the thinkers by
the sea decided to elevate this into a ritualised, semi-social and
beneficial activity.

To help him in his rehabilitation he presents them as men of their time and
location, which is where the book becomes a march past of other contemporary
Scottish thinkers. First is the Revd Daniel McLaughlan, author of the 1735
treatise An essay upon improving and adding to the strength of Great Britain
and Ireland, by fornication. Men, he wrote, had a duty to fornicate, for the
resulting children would benefit manufacturing industry and fill the
colonies, and the world, with good British stock. This helpful clergyman was
immediately thrown into jail.

An even stricter moralist was James Graham, who, in the interests of happy
monogamy, built a vibrating magnetic bed, which he hired out, and spent much
of his later life trying to raise money to build a bigger, better version
with music. He too ended up in the slammer.

An old friend makes his inevitable entrance. Of James Boswell the professor
writes:

[His] sex-life began inadvertently. Climbing trees, embracing trunk and
limbs and hauling himself along, brought him intense sensations that made
him think of heaven, and he would fall to the ground in a swoon. He asked
the gardener for an explanation, but ‘He, rigid, did not explain it,’ the
poor man no doubt being unnerved by the young master repeatedly plummeting
out of trees with a blissful expression on his face ….

And even then the professor, and Scotland, are not done. After the first
world war a Black Watch colonel acquired the regalia, to which he added a
wig made out of the pubic hair of Charles II’s mistresses (it is a very
large wig), and with like-minded senior officers, one of them a VC, revived
the Beggar’s Benison. These maniacs devised a ritual of their own, which
they practised at dawn on the sea shore. No details of this survive, but it
is significant that no sooner had the colonel run out of dawns than his
widow tried to get the antiques out of the house.

What makes all this so wonderful is that it is a serious historical work
with footnotes, and it is more than this. Professor Stevenson’s efforts to
do well by his boys is in the end a sort of triumph of the human spirit. A
man could do worse than read Scottish history at St Andrews.